The Riddles of The Hobbit (20 page)

That
The Lord of the Rings
is a great work of Catholic literature, as well as a great work in the Fantasy tradition, has been argued by several critics.
8
I have already quoted the letter that Tolkien wrote to Father Robert Murray in 1953, describing his own work as ‘fundamentally religious and Catholic’. And even without ‘decoding’ the
novel as a religious allegory we can see that, naturally enough, many elements from Christian myth have shaped the imaginary world of Middle-earth. In particular the novels demonstrate a fascination with the Fall that introduces mortality to the world, and with ethical choice. Writing to Milton Waldman in 1951 Tolkien said that ‘all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality and the Machine’.
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It tells the story of self-sacrifice, and a saviour who travels the paths of the dead only to return in triumph; of the tremendous significance of the moral choices people are presented with, particularly of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times.

Bernard Bergonzi, in his article ‘The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Novel’ argues that ‘the English Catholic novel … did not dramatize Catholic theology
tout court
, for there is no such single entity, but a particular and extreme theological emphasis, where religious beliefs were caught up with literary attitudes and conventions’.
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Assuming we wish to bracket
The Lord of the Rings
with the writers about which Bergonzi is here talking (Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh predominantly) we might wish to go on and explore how ‘particular and extreme’ the theological emphasis of Tolkien’s fantasy is. The particular element that articulates itself through the work is, I am suggesting, precisely this sacramental element.

One such element is the matter of free will. As Colin Manlove points out, one malign effect of the Ring is precisely to compromise Frodo’s free will.

Frodo has been ‘chosen’ for his task; by itself this is reasonable enough, for it would still leave him room to decide whether to take it up. But there are additional determining factors. Bilbo could voluntarily leave the Ring to Frodo because the Ring wanted to go to Frodo: as Gandalf says ‘he would never have just forsaken it, or cast it aside. It was … the Ring itself that decided things. The Ring left
him
.’ And since the Ring wants to be with Frodo, it is impossible for him to get rid of it as it was not for Bilbo: Gandalf tells him that he could not ‘make’ Frodo give it up ‘except by force, which would break your mind’. Therefore, Frodo has to keep the Ring.
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Later in the novel, Manlove suggests, ‘this core of necessity is hopefully overlain with an apparent act of will’. Frodo, reflecting on his
‘evil fate’ recalls that ‘he had taken it on himself in his own sitting room in the far-off spring of another year’. According to Manlove, however: ‘this is not true to the facts’.

Certain difficulties do indeed present themselves. For example, how is it that Bilbo was able effectively to ‘divorce’ himself from the Ring? Manlove’s answer (that the Ring wanted to leave) addresses the question on the terms of the localised rationalisation provided by the text rather than according to its symbolic logic. But does this mean that Bilbo somehow has more free will than Frodo? That cannot be: Catholicism does not say that free will is distributed amongst human beings like height or wealth, some with more and some less. We all have the freedom to choose good or evil; and it is a choice equally important to all of us.

One way of answering this question would be to say that Bilbo can divorce himself from the Ring where Frodo cannot because Bilbo’s story (primarily
The Hobbit
) takes place within the ethical framework of Old Germanic culture; where Frodo’s story in
The Lord of the Rings
—though set in the same fictive world—actually takes place within the different conceptual and ideological-theological climate of Tolkien’s Catholic beliefs.

Free will in Christian theology means that we all have—at all times, whenever we make a choice—the freedom to choose to do good or evil. The fact that God (omnipotent, and knowing the future as He does) already knows all the choices we are ever going to make in our life does not diminish this freedom
as it presents itself to us
, in time, continuously. But marriage is something of a special case that divides Protestant and Catholic theologies. For a Protestant it is possible to choose divorce (which is to say; Protestants have the freedom, under certain circumstances, to choose to end their marriage). This is not a choice offered to Catholics. Of course, a Catholic might say, everybody who enters into a marriage does so, or
should
do so, of their own free will. That is to say, the proscription against divorce can be thought of as a way of saying merely that once a choice has been freely made it is then necessary to live with the consequences of that choice—which, if anything, places a higher value upon the notion of free will. Of course Catholics are perfectly capable of freely willing for themselves the evils of adultery, bigamy and so on. Marriage is no more a
practically
binding relationship for them than it is for a non-Catholic. But in Catholic belief it is a
spiritually
binding one.
Catholics who go through a form of divorce and begin relationships with others are, their priest might say, only fooling themselves. In the eyes of God they are still married.

Frodo’s ambiguous position with respect to the Ring mirrors this problematic. Once he accepts the Ring (although at that point he knows no better: we wonder—if Frodo had known all the trouble bound up with the Ring, would he have accepted it from Bilbo?)—once he
has
accepted it, he is bound to it. He cannot divorce himself from it. Only death can break the bond. In the novel this is realised by the death of the Ring itself, which occurs at the moment of the death of Gollum.

This may seem like a rather bleak, even carceral vision of marriage, but it is not out of keeping with Tolkien’s thoughts on the subject. In a letter to his son from 1941 Tolkien wrote that women are ‘instinctively monogamous’ (qualifying the judgement with ‘when uncorrupt’) but that men are not. Their fallen nature destroys the possibility of a monogamous alignment between male bodies, minds and soul.

He goes on:

However, the essence of a
fallen
world is that the
best
cannot be attained by free enjoyment … but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. For a Christian man there is
no escape
. Marriage may help to sanctify & direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle remains.
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This may seem a rather extreme way to construe marriage (‘for a Christian man there is
no escape
… ’), especially when Tolkien ends this same letter by commending his son to ‘the one great thing to love on Earth: the Blessed Sacrament’. There is, we might feel, something alarming in any free agent being so remorselessly bound to anything.

At that time when he was still friendly with C. S. Lewis, Tolkien wrote to offer an opinion upon Lewis’s book
Christian Behaviour
(1943), in which the argument is advanced that there ought to be two forms of marriage: one a Christian commitment, lifelong and binding; the other a purely secular State-sanctioned contract which could be dissolved. Tolkien disapproved of this idea, insisting (the
words in square brackets mark Tolkien’s revisions to the original draft of this letter) that

Christian Marriage
—monogamous, permanent [lifelong], rigidly ‘faithful’—is in fact the truth about sexual behaviour for all humanity: this is the only road of total health [total human health] (including [with] sex in its proper place) for all [
all
] men and women.
13

There is an interesting diremption between ‘permanent’ and ‘lifelong’ here. One of the pieces of prose not included in the
Silmarillion
is a fairly lengthy discussion entitled ‘Of the Laws and Customs among the Eldar pertaining to Marriage and Other Matters Related Thereunto’ (it is included in volume 10 of Christopher Tolkien’s
History of Middle Earth
,
Morgoth’s Ring
). Here we learn that the elves lived according to strict notions of married chastity:

The Eldar wedded once only in life, and for love or at the least by free will upon either part. Even when in after days, as the histories reveal, many of the Eldar in Middle-earth became corrupted, and their hearts darkened by the shadow that lies upon Arda, seldom is any tale told of deeds of lust among them.
14

There is one detail of quasi-Lewisian compromise: Tolkien adds a period of betrothal (‘the betrothed gave silver rings one to another’) that ‘was bound to stand for one year at least, and it often stood for longer. During this time it could be revoked by a public return of the rings, the rings then being molten and not again used for a betrothal. Such was the law.’ Should the betrothal lead to marriage the betrothed ‘received back one from the other their silver rings (and treasured them); but they gave in exchange slender rings of gold, which were worn upon the index of the right hand.’
15

All this business with the interchange of rings is very interesting. We might, in the light of it, want to read the One Ring as embodying a sort of malign anti-marriage, the photographic negative, as it were, of a blessed sacrament. The only major character in
The Lord of the Rings
whom Tolkien dramatises as a functioning member of a happy marriage is also the only character in the book wholly immune to the power of the ring: Tom Bombadil, who alone amongst all the major
characters in the book has a wife. He asks Frodo for the ring, and Frodo ‘handed it at once to Tom’:

It seemed for a moment to grow larger as it lay far a moment on his big brown-skinned hand. Then suddenly he put it to his eye and laughed. For a second the hobbits had a vision, both comical and alarming, of his bright blue eye gleaming through a circle of gold. Then Tom put the Ring around the end of his little finger and held it up to the candlelight. For a moment the hobbits noticed nothing strange about this. Then they gasped. There was no sign of Tom disappearing!
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The point of this episode is to dramatise that the ring has no effect upon Tom (when Frodo later slips the ring on he becomes invisible to everybody except Bombadil). It is ‘alarming’ to see Tom’s blue eye through the ring presumably because it recalls and inverts the red eye of Sauron. But my suggestion here is that the episode depends as much upon Tom’s status as happily married man as to his slightly inchoate status as ‘spirit of the land’. It is remarkable to think that Tom and Goldberry are the only functioning—which is to say, loving, sacramental—marriage in the whole of
Lord of the Rings
; or at least, they are until the ring is destroyed and marriage again becomes possible (and, for example, Sam can marry Rosie). Therefore is Tom immune to the malign power of the One Ring. Indeed, the hobbits’ sojourn in Tom and Goldberry’s house is figured as the symbolic equivalent of travelling through a wedding band: ‘the hobbits stood upon the threshold, and a golden light was all about them … The four hobbits stepped over the wide stone threshold.’
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I am still, I hope, steering clear of the suggestion that we read
The Lord of the Rings
as an allegory of marriage; or even that it represents some sort of satire upon marriage as a oppressive power-trap. Rather Tolkien has taken ‘marriage’, in the broadest sense and with an understanding of marriage as a synecdochal sacrament for the connection between the material and the spiritual, as a structuring principle for his Fantasy. What is wedded in
The Lord of the Rings
is not so much ‘a man and a woman’ (let us say, Sam and Rosie; or Aragorn and Arwen). It is the possibility of the connection of a materially embodied reality to a form of divinity. But what saves this aesthetic conception from a banal piety is precisely the double-edged valences
of the Ring. It is both attractive and alarming: the ring around us protects, but also hems us in. Marriage is a connection founded in love, but also a restriction on the polygamous nature of man (‘Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails … great mortification’). It draws us and it makes us suffer, but it also connects us with the grace of a bountiful and exacting God. This is the appeal, and the cost, of the central project of
The Lord of the Rings
.

The ring is a riddle, and its solution unpacks deeper, more spiritually profound riddles. And here is Riddle 48 from the
Exeter Book
, one of the riddles that scholarship has failed, satisfactorily, to solve:

I heard a radiant ring, with no tongue,

intercede for me, though it spoke

without argument or strident words.

The silent treasure said in front of men

‘Save me, helper of souls.’

May men understand the mysterious saying

of the red gold and, as the ring said,

wisely entrust their salvation to God.

I am, in other words, suggesting that Tolkien’s imaginative creation of a sacramental gold ring connects, in suggestively oblique ways, precisely with an Anglo-Saxon riddle that proposes such a magic circle as a link between men and God.

This
book has followed a roundabout road from the riddles in general, to the riddles contained within
The Hobbit
through questions of hands and rings. These last two concerns come about in part because this novel is handiwork, and rings adorn hands. I have sometimes thought that crowns, by adorning heads, imply that it is our clever brains that make us special amongst the animals; but that Tolkien’s preference for rings over crowns speaks, perhaps, to a deeper truth. A clever brain may be a very useful thing, but without the means to work cleverness into the world it is nothing. Maybe we overpraise ourselves, Saruman-like, for our powers of thinking. Maybe it is our clever
hands
that really separate us from the animals: dextrous, thumb-opposed, grasping, manipulating, shaping, making. Conceivably, a ring is, as it were, a crown for the hand.